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Thursday, March 6, 2014

I bought a fancy atlatl at the knap-in last weekend. I've made my own atlatls in the past. It's easy to carve a crude but functional one from a tree branch. In contrast, the one I bought, from Thunderbird Atlatls, is a minor work of art.

My new atlatl

If you're buying a making a spearthrower, the most important consideration is that it fits your hand easily so that your fingers can hold the dart shaft. If your hand is small or your fingers stubby, you should take extra care to ensure that you can use the instrument effectively.

More importantly, I bought several darts, which are much harder to make than a spearthrower.

Atlatl darts

I took the spearthrower and the darts out for a test drive yesterday with one of my graduate students, Kelin Flanagan.

Here are four short videos of her shooting darts.

Kelin is a natural!

Unfortunately, the best video would not upload, perhaps because of the file size. [Update: I converted the largest file to mpg format, and it uploaded, but Blogger still messed up the resolution.] Also, note that the original videos are much higher resolution than these. I suspect the blogging website reduced the resolution to shrink the file size.

It was a heck of a drive. Google Maps said it would be about 6 hours and 49 minutes driving time, but it took us much more--it seemed like 8 hours--even though there were no detours, construction zones, or traffic jams.

The nearest town, between our hotel and the park, was Sopchoppy. It's a small town that looks like it's down on its luck: a lot of stores are closed, some houses are abandoned, and some structures are collapsing. The town used to be a stop on a long-abandoned rail line that served the logging and turpentine industries. Since they dried up a century ago, Sopchoppy has been struggling. That why we were shocked but delighted to find that the only restaurant in town was superb. The Sopchoppy Pizza Company serves not only really excellent pizza but a variety of other tasty and creative dishes. It's housed in a nicely maintained historic building and the decor is fun and charming. It's immaculate and homey. Ironically, it is a far better restaurant than most of those in the affluent and sophisticated area where I live in Palm Beach County.

The two students I brought, Lana Ruck and Justin Colon, are both interested in lithic analysis. Lana's research focuses on determining handedness from debitage attributes. The evolution of handedness is important because it may be related to the evolution of language. Both are related to brain laterality and they are processed in similar and unusual ways in the brain. To test her hypotheses, which include attempts to replicate the results of previous studies that have claimed to identify handedness from debitage, she needs debitage from left-handed knappers. As it happens, left-handed knappers turn out to be as rare as Tea Party Communists. But there were several at the knap-in, and so Lana was able to collect some critical data.

Lana and Justin

Here's a sight you won't often see: two left-handed knappers.

Two left-handed knappers

Here's one of them actually knapping, with the copper billet in his left hand.

Left-handed knapping in progress

We spent most of our time just practicing. The many experienced knappers there were very generous in sharing their knowledge and experience with amateurs like us. I bought a couple of hundred pounds of nice chert from a vendor. That was a significant motivation for attending, for me, because it's really hard to buy chert sight-unseen on the Internet and the shipping costs are prohibitive anyway. Because I drove up in a big SUV, I could carry back as much chert as I could afford to buy. I spent $500 on chert at $3/lb, which seemed to be the going rate. It's nice material: Georgetown flint from Texas, smooth as butter. I also picked up some useful knapping tools, such as pressure flakers. I have made these by hand in the past, but the ones on sale were nice. It is difficult to assemble a good collection of tools, such as billets, flakers, and hammerstones, but the largest impediment to learning how to knap is obtaining a sufficient supply of good raw material to practice on. So, being able to buy a pile of chert was very important to me.

Here's our tarp with our knapping stuff on it, with and without grad students:

The tarp we bought for knapping

Justin and Lana preparing to knap

The weather was beautiful, cool, dry, and crisp. There were knapping contests (we only observed), demonstrations, and folk music. A fun time was had by all.